Allen Dulles and the OUN-B; Did the CIA/MI6 use of Nazis in Ukraine During the Cold War Ever Stop?

According to Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War by Richard Breitman and Norman Goda, U.S. intelligence documents released in 2010 reveal that on May 5, 1952, the Deputy Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, well-known for running the Nazi Ratlines after World War II, which facilitated the escape of Nazi war criminals, wrote a letter to the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization on the subject of Mykola Lebed, the chief of the secret police organization of Stephen Bandera's OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists).

In the letter Dulles wrote that Lebed was of "inestimable value to this Agency in its operations. In connection with future Agency operations of the first importance, it is urgently necessary that subject be able to travel in Western Europe, before subject undertakes such travel, however, this Agency must be in a position to assure his reentry into the United States without investigation or incident which would attact undue attention to his activities. Your Service has indicated that it cannot give such assurance because of the fact that subject was convicted in 1936 of complicity in the 1934 assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.... Your Service has indicated that, if the subject reenters the United States on a reentry permit, an investigation must then be conducted.... In order to remove the obstacles to the fulfillment of this Agency's projected operations and pursuant to the authority granted under Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949, I approve and recommend for your approval, the entrance of this subject into the United States for permanent residence under the above Act because such entry is essential to the furtherance of the national intelligence mission and is in the interest of national security."

Both Bandera, who was also convicted for assassinating the Polish Interior Minister, and Lebed escaped prison in Poland when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Then, when the Nazis invaded the U.S.S.R. on June 22, 1941, Bandera and Lebed declared a sovereign and united Ukrainian state in East Galicia. Lebed, having trained at a Gestapo center in Zakopane, was to be the new minister for security.

A Banderist proclamation in April 1941 claimed that "Jews in the U.S.S.R. constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine." Pogroms in East Galicia in the war's first days killed perhaps 12,000 Jews. In April 1943, Lebed proposed to "cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population." On a single day, July 11, 1943, the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) attacked some 80 localities, killing perhaps 10,000 Poles.

Allen Dulles's letter makes no mention of Lebed's training by the Gestapo, nor his and Bandera's ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles in Ukraine.

As documented by Breitman and Goda, the mission referred to Dulles was, like today's, to wage war against Russia (then the Soviet Union) on Ukrainian soil, employing known Nazis. Their account raises serious questions as to whether this program was ever stopped as claimed.

Bandera himself was employed not by the CIA but by MI6, which worked with him until at least 1954. He was later picked up by the German BND headed by Gen. Reinhardt Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II, in 1959. Bandera's personal contact in West German intelligence was Heinz Danko Herre, Gehlen's old deputy. Herre admitted that West German use of Bandera was a "closely held" secret even within the BND and that the relationship was "not cleared with Bonn due to political overtones."

Bandera had been trying to obtain a U.S. visa since 1955. Despite refusing to work with him, in October 1959 the CIA recommended that he obtain the visa. Ten days later he was assassinated, reportedly by the KGB.

While the MI6 and BND worked with Bandera, the CIA worked instead with Lebed from 1950, until the so-called end of the Cold War in 1990, despite the fact that a CIC (U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps) report from July 1947 called Lebed a "well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans." Lebed was initially moved by the Army from Rome to Munich after the war. He later relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship, thanks to Allen Dulles.

Once in the United States, he became the CIA's chief contact for Operation Aerodynamics, which was the successor to the earlier Operation Cartel. These operations were for "the support, development and exploitation of the Ukrainian underground movement for resistance and intelligence purposes."

Beginning in 1953, Aerodynamic began to operate though a Ukrainian study group under Lebed's leadership in New York under CIA auspices. In 1956, this group was incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association. In 1956 alone, with CIA support, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio programs totaling 70 hours per month, and distributed 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 pamphlets. Beginning in 1960, Prolog also employed a CIA-trained Ukrainian named Anatol Kaminsky. By 1966 Kaminsky was Prolog's chief operations officer, while Lebed provided overall management.

Lebed retired in 1975, but remained an adviser and consultant to Prolog. In the 1980s Aerodynamic's name was changed to Qrdynamic, Pddynamic, and then Qrplumb. In the 1980s, Prolog expanded its operations to reach other Soviet nationalities. Allegedly, Qrplumb was terminted in 1990. Prolog, however, was allowed to continue its activities, but it was allegedly on its own financially, which raises questions as to whether this entire operation has continued to today.

In June 1985, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed. The CIA worried that an investigation of Lebed would compromise Qrplumb, protected Lebed once again by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis. As late as 1991, the CIA tried to dissuade the OSI from obtaining wartime records related to OUN-B from the German, Polish and Soviet governments. Lebed died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey.

But what we are seeing in Ukraine today, is the same fascist policy pursued by Allen Dulles, this time under Barack Obama, which raises the question: Did Qrplumb/Prolog ever stop?